"Almost from the beginning of Sanford R. Gifford’s career as a landscape painter, in the mid-1840s, he found inspiration and delight in the confluence of light and air in nature, increasingly understood during the 1850s in terms of color. At the end of that decade he was repeatedly commissioned to paint vistas unified and glorified in golden aeriality, idealizing the American wilderness, often peopled with Native Americans and amusingly titled Indian Summer. An abrupt change of mood—dark, even menacing—invades some of his paintings of the early 1860s, including A Lake Twilight. This was interpreted in retrospect by George W. Sheldon as a conscious rejection by the artist of earlier stereotyping ('How One Landscape Painter Paints,' Art Journal, no. 3, 1877, pp. 284–285). In fact, many American landscape painters embraced twilight subjects during the anguished time leading up to and during the Civil War. For Gifford, whose patriotic as well as abolitionist proclivities had been expressed in his European Journals of 1855-57, the turmoil of this period, compounded by constant awareness of the suffering from severe depression of his brother Charles—his kindred spirit in love of art and wilderness—imagery of sunny effulgence was no longer adequate (Sanford R. Gifford, 'European Letters,' 3 vols., Archives of American Art, microfilm D21). Sanford joined the Seventh Regiment, New York State National Guard, in April 1861; Charles died of a drug overdose a month later.
"A Lake Twilight was purchased soon after its completion in early 1861 for the art collection of the Young Men’s Association of Troy, New York. The painting is listed as #233 in the Gifford Memorial Catalogue (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1881), 16 by 28 inches, sold in 1861 to the Troy institution but not traceable twenty years later. That upstate self-improvement organization, part of the athenaeum movement, was founded in 1835. It amassed a library, sponsored lectures and debates, and held annual art exhibitions, all necessitating fundraising that was supported by Gifford and other artists. The Gifford painting shown in their 1861 exhibition as 'Sunset' was probably A Lake Twilight. Other works of his had been acquired there in 1859 and 1860 (Ila Weiss, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford, Newark, Delaware, 1987, p. 86; Kevin J. Avery and Franklin Kelly, eds., Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, New York, 2003, p. 117).
"Two known paintings by Gifford may be considered preliminary to the twilight painting. A Mountain Lake at Sunset, 7 by 12 inches (MC 493), at the New Britain Museum of Art in Connecticut, retains elements of Indian Summer imagery: a central iconic mountain beyond water and forested foothills, doubled in reflection; and a wigwam and its presumed occupant beaching a canoe in the left foreground, derived from Gifford’s 1859 drawings of the Micmacs of Nova Scotia. The vista may be a recollection of the double peaked Vermont mountain, Camel’s Hump, viewed from across Lake Champlain, an area Gifford had explored in 1858. In this painting, however, the mountain is darkened to cobalt blue in near-silhouette against a transitional twilight sky, the sun just disappearing behind a distant peak toward the right. The sky, pale azure at the upper edge blending to yellow towards the obscured horizon, is energized by horizontal streaks of pink-purple clouds fading in the radiance, while pink-lit, purple toned cloud puffs rise in response to the mountain contour.
"Directly preparatory to A Lake Twilight is a painting called Twilight Mountain at the Lorenzo State Historic Site in Cazenovia, New York. As an inscription on the verso identifies the work as a Christmas gift of 1860, it was most likely painted not long after Sanford’s visit to his ailing brother in Wisconsin that September. Almost as large as the final version, 15⅞ by 21¾ inches, its squarer format and looser brushwork project immediacy, as does the replacement of the nostalgia-laden Native American staffage with the contemporaneity of a white-shirted hunter loading a deer carcass into his bateau in the foreground—an activity in which the artist may have engaged, possibly accompanied by his early camping companion, Charles. While a ruddy luminosity subsumes details on the mountain side, red highlighted trees on the middle-distant shore contract the space. A repoussoir of dead tree trunks at the left and a bristling fallen trunk at the bottom edge create a tactile visual barrier to the evoked experience.
A comparison of the preliminary study with the resolved imagery of A Lake Twilight further reveals the artist’s process and intention. The lurid coloring of the study is now modified as a more subtle mixture of warmth and coolness to capture a fleeting light-moment. Toward the right, warm white light of the just-set sun, thickly painted, is tenderly reflected by small cloud streaks, their impasto texture catching actual light to intensify the effect. The sky, deepened to grayed azure at the left, fades in response to the white effulgence, with the pale salmon-colored horizontal cloud-bar bisecting the peak comparably affected. An elegant contour refines the shape of the double-humped mountain, its rightmost peak curving in response to the brilliant light. Despite the transformation, an old inscription on the stretcher, not in Gifford’s hand, identifies the view as 'Twilight in the Green Mountains, Vt.,' possibly confirming the Camel’s Hump identification. Momentarily affected by the dazzling radiance, the mountain peak glows light salmon above gray-purple shadow. In the foothills, a few black conifers and red-orange highlights on scattered trees evoke the dense forest submerged in purplish-brown gloom. The watery reflection doubles the dark warm tones of mountain and hills, then the sky’s gray-blue, with white containing hints of yellow and salmon echoing the light drama in the right foreground. The space is magnified in breadth and depth, the far shore widened to occupy the more horizontal format and its recession exaggerated through adjustments of scale and tonal modulation. Highlights are now picturesquely concentrated on the foreground, white and salmon touching rocks and a birch tree that replaces some of the bare trunks of the study’s repoussoir; and access to the hunter has been cleared. Juxtaposed to the substance and weight of the foreground, the more tonally unified, deeply colored aerial distance is separated as a realm of beauty and ideality—a memory, perhaps, and a welcoming escape.
"That
this
painting may have been closely related to a lost National Academy
exhibition
piece of 1859, A Sunset in the
Wilderness, an
earlier moment, is suggested by a description of the latter as
'gorgeous
in color, the western sky filled with golden light, the mountains
bathed in the
gloom of the coming darkness, and the rosy tints reflected from the
brilliant
clouds, and the deep blue of the sky above, are very happily brought
down into
the soft verdure and the quiet waters of the foreground' (“Exhibition
at
the Academy of Design: Second Article,” New
York Semi-Weekly Tribune, May 17, 1859, p. 2).
"Another observer commented, Gifford’s 'pictures are remarkable
for expression, a quality that we so often
miss in the most elaborate and finished productions' ('Galleries of the
Academy of Design,' Manufacturers and
Farmers Journal, Providence, Rhode Island, May 9, 1859, p. 2).
"Gifford’s twilight imagery at the brink of the Civil War culminated in the huge, for Gifford, Twilight in the Catskills, 27 by 54 inches, at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. The impact of its size, wide format, and dramatic effect of colored light created a sensation at the 1861 National Academy Annual, widely recorded. Its heavily clouded upper sky, stained dark red by the afterglow and punctuated with red-orange cloud-dashes, looms over a narrower band of luminous orange containing yellow radiance at its center. A distant string of mountains is plunged into near-blackness, its forms barely discernable in the dim red light. Bare dead trees bracket the panorama, black lines against the sky. In the gorge below the vantage point, brilliant reflected sky light snakes along a waterway into the inky distance.
While the Catskills painting was Gifford’s most dramatic twilight image, reactions to it suggest the impact of similar contemporary imagery, fraught with emotion, including A Lake Twilight. At a preview exhibition of the Catskills painting one reviewer commented, 'the luminous sky, empurpled hills, and finely glowing sentiment of the whole, indicate that the artist of this picture has a power of color-treatment that has been partially latent in previous efforts' ('The Artists’ Reception at the Studio Building,' World, March 7, 1861, p. 5). When shown at the National Academy, Twilight in the Catskills was proclaimed 'the representative landscape of the year.'
'Nothing approaching it in power, in a certain volcanic intensity…is to be found in the exhibition…The picture unites many of the elements essential to a grand and powerful interpretation of one of those capricious moods in which Nature sometimes indulges. The sunset is not an average sunset. The royal purple of the hillsides is not their habitual evening garb. The light which the stream reflects is ghastly…Even the dead golden tinge which kindles upon the distant tree tops, and glimmers through the brooding purple of the twilight, has about it something mysterious and alien…These are the exceptional moods which Nature delights to talk of, and it seems to us that Mr. Gifford has hit upon and reproduced such a one. His work…could hardly be more powerful or imply a more thorough mastery of the resources of the palette' (Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,' World, April 6, 1861, p. 3)."
The lot has an estimate of $1,200,000 to $1,800,000. It sold for $2,900,000.
"A
chance, congenial encounter at
"Edward
F. de Lancey,
(1821-1905) a widowed
"In three extant letters...written during 1868 from, respectively,
"As a studio project, the present picture was re-orienting—or
Orientalizing—for
Church. He began it just weeks after having surveyed in London during
December
1867 with a well-connected English escort, the editor, playwright and
art
critic Tom Taylor (1817-80), the bewildering studio contents which
J.M.W.
Turner (1775-1851), the far-famed English landscape and marine painter,
had
bequeathed to Britain. An autographed photograph portrait of
"Church's Ruins of Baalbek attenuates
Turner's mid- and late-life Mediterranean oeuvre and
to a lesser extent Claude's images with
ruined architecture, while maintaining Church's signature
verisimilitude. In
1992 ('Frederic Edwin Church and
"Church's next Mediterranean studio canvas, the same-size Valley of the Lebanon..., was painted entirely at
"It seems to me that the muted Turnerian tenor of Ruins of Baalbek honestly
signals Church at that initiating transitional period for him, 1868,
and the
bolder Valley of the Lebanon at
that subsequent transitional period, 1868-69. Through his travels in
Europe and
especially the
"Thomas
Cole’s singular legacy remains as the progenitor of the Hudson River
School, the
first native art movement born within the United States. Learning from
Cole, ensuing generations of painters working within
this genre were
able to visually parallel the untapped resources of the American
wilderness
with the potent energy of a maturing nation. Born in Lancaster,
England in 1801, Cole
emigrated to the United States
with his family and settled in Philadelphia
when he was seventeen. By 1825 Cole had moved repeatedly, spending time
in Ohio and Pittsburgh,
before arriving in New York where he
traveled up the Hudson River for the first
time. The young painter quickly rose to significant prominence within
New York’s cultural
community to become one of the founding members of the National
Academy of
Design the same year.
"Cole’s early success enabled him to take the 'Grand
Tour' in 1829, visiting England,
France and Italy over a
three year period. While he virulently disliked the French artists of
his day,
Cole found refuge in the natural splendor of Italy. Like many in
the American cultural and intellectual elite of the early
nineteenth
century, Cole developed a strong interest in the compelling duality of
Italian
history. Visiting Americans could marvel at the former majesty and
achievement
of their Roman past, lamenting its dissolution ever-present in the
Romantic
ruins and crumbling aqueducts, and claiming their nation as the
intellectual
successor to the Classical world.
"Compared to the robust, unconquerable landscapes that define
Cole’s Hudson River paintings, Sunset
on the Arno presents a softer, more tranquil version of nature.
Defined
by the serpentine Arno river, which eaves
through the foreground and middleground of the picture, the composition
encourages the viewer’s eye to meander through the picturesque
countryside. To
the right and above in the distance are the dark woods of the Cascine.
Beyond
them, the mountain summit half dissolves in the vapory splendor of an
Italian
sunset. Although there are several structures present in the
composition, they
too seem only a degree removed from the natural world, mere elements of
the
background and not the intended subject of the work. An airy
warmth
radiates from the fading sun and the river is denoted by pale
amber
tones with highlights of dusty pinks and warmer blues.
"As with his trips through Upstate New York and New England,
Cole kept sketchbooks full of careful pictorial and written notes while
traveling through Italy.
He heavily relied on this documentation as an aide-mémoire for his
studio
compositions. Cole rarely based his final canvases on a single
sketch or
description, choosing instead to amalgamate multiple sources
combined with
elements from his imagination. Per this working process, Cole
completed Sunset on the Arno in
1837, five years
following his return to North America, and one year after he completed
his
celebrated series The Course of
Empire (1833-36, New-York
Historical Society, New York).
As in his best compositions, the present work demonstrates Cole's
unique
ability to “draw a veil over the common details, the unessential
parts,
which shall leave the great features, whether the beautiful or the
sublime,
dominant in the mind” (Matthew Baigell, Thomas Cole, New York, 1981,
p. 13).
"This harmonization of precise details of compositional
elements, such as the charming river boats and their canopies, with the
atmospheric and ambiguous setting of countryside bathed in early
evening light,
creates a compellingly timeless vision of Italy. The stillness and
tranquility of the composition presents the viewer with a vista that
feels
unaffected by time, and a way of life lived in continuity for
centuries. The
Italian landscape offered the American creative intellect a tangible
heritage—a
visible past which was not found in the uncultivated wilderness of
their
native land."
The
lot has an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. It failed to sell.
"Jacob Lawrence executed The
Carpenters in 1946, soon after he completed his military
service during
the Second World War. The body of work executed by the artist upon
his
return home demonstrates his profound interest in the depiction of
African
American workers and labor, subjects that would preoccupy him for
nearly the
entirety of his career.
"Lawrence synthesizes dark and light tones to
portray the principal elements of the composition, creating tonal
modulations
that imply volume and create a remarkable dynamism that permeates the
composition. Indeed, In the present work, Lawrence
depicts an industrious carpentry shop, its employees all busily engaged
in the
tasks of the day. The work aptly exemplifies Lawrence’s signature
Cubist-based style,
demonstrated in the compressed pictorial space, his reductive color
palette and
use of angular planes and fractured forms. LawrenceLawrence
actively considers the structural role of color in works such as The
Carpenters, once articulating its power as “change as you move
over the
picture plane, in any of the elements with which you are working—the
change of
the texture, line, the warm color against a cool color, a shape. [How a
color]
in a round shape means something different if it’s a square or a
rectangle” (as
quoted in Lowery Sims Stokes, “The Structure of Narrative: Form and
Content in
Jacob Lawrence’s Builders Paintings, 1946-1948,” Over
the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, Seattle, Washington, p.
208).
"Works
such as The Carpenters display
Lawrence’s incisive examination of social
issues, particularly the African American experience in the post-war
years. Not unlike the images of barbers, builders and seamstresses
Lawrence produced during this period, The
Carpenters depicts a profession that did not legally or
socially exclude black Americans, thus capturing “the economic
advancement that
marked the war years for African Americans as well as the aspirations
for
greater advancement in American society, which would coalesce into the
civil
rights movement in the 1950s” (Ibid., p. 211).
"Lawrence would
return to The Carpenters
subject again in the late 1960s, placing it among
the most persistent themes in his body of work. The present
work was
unknown to Lawrence
scholars until 2019, having remained in the family of its original
owners, who
purchased it from The Downtown Gallery soon after it was completed
in 1946."
"Among
the most
significant painters of the twentieth century, Edward Hopper cultivated
a
quintessentially American aesthetic marked by evocative images that
captured
the subtle intrigue and psychological complexity of modern urban
existence. His
contemplation of the commonplace and his penetrating study of the
psyche burrow
deep beneath the unremarkable surfaces of archetypal American subjects:
nighttime diners, dimly-lit hotel interiors, and forlorn vernacular
architecture. Though based on a fundamental commitment to naturalistic
representation, Hopper’s work transcends mere narrative illustration in
search
of the symbolic and suggestive. His art serves as a form of
sublimation, a
deeply personal expression of his inner emotional response to the
physical world.
Summarizing the difficulty of imbuing his paintings with incommunicable
thought, Hopper once remarked: 'If I could say it in words there would
be no
reason to paint it' (as quoted in Edward
Hopper & Company, San Francisco, California, 2009, n.p.).
"Painted in 1935, Shakespeare at
Dusk captures
the visual poetry of twilight in a large city, when the cacophonous
noise of
streetcars and elevated trains begins to acquiesce to the stillness of
night.
This Central Park scene belongs to Hopper’s celebrated series of New
York
cityscapes—subject matter he explored early in his career while
studying under
Robert Henri and continued until his death in 1967. A lifelong lover of
poetry
and prose, Shakespeare at Dusk is
among the only major works in Hopper’s oeuvre that
overtly references the profound influence of literature on his
emotional
response to specific times of day, particularly the evening. The poems
that he
quoted, often as explanations for his own art, frequently focus on the
mood of
dusk—its sense of mystery, anxiety, and eros born out of the varying
effects of
light and shadow.
"Based on Henri’s teaching, Hopper’s formative New York
canvases, such as Blackwell’s
Island (1911 Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York), Queensborough Bridge (1913,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), and East River (1920-23, Private
collection), are
devoted to scenes along the city’s waterways near his former studio at
53 East
59
thStreet. Hopper did not
return to specific New York subject matter until the late 1920s when he
painted The City (1927,
University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona), a second
iteration
of Blackwell’s Island (1928,
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville,
Arkansas), Williamsburg Bridge (1928, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928,
Addison Gallery of
American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts). In the
following
decades, Hopper ventured further uptown for subject matter, portraying
the
Harlem River in Macomb’s Dam
Bridge (1935, Brooklyn Museum, New York), Central Park
in Bridle Path (1939,
Private collection), and Riverside
Park in August in the City (1945, Norton Museum of
Art, West
Palm Beach, Florida). Nearer his studio at 3 Washington Square North,
where he
lived and worked from 1913 until his death, Hopper based Early Sunday Morning (1930,
Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York) on shops along Seventh Avenue
and Nighthawks (1942,
Art Institute of
Chicago, Illinois) on a restaurant on the corner of Eleventh Street and
Seventh
Avenue. In a 1935 interview for the New
York Post, the
reporter Archer Winsten asked what Hopper did for fun. He replied: “I
get most
of my pleasure out of the city itself” (as quoted in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography,
New York, 1995, updated
& expanded 2007, p. 270).
"Shakespeare at Dusk depicts
two statues cloaked in shadow near the deserted southern end of the
Central
Park Mall, which is illuminated by the vibrant afterglow of sunset on
the
horizon behind the shadows of high-rises at the western end of the
park. The
inclusion of identifiable modern skyscrapers is exceedingly rare in
Hopper’s oeuvre and
the present work is one of only a few New York scenes where the exact
physical location is
clearly apparent. In the foreground, Hopper presents John Quincy Adams
Ward’s
full-standing sculptural portrait of the celebrated playwright William
Shakespeare, with his head bowed in contemplative thought. Describing
the
scarcity of recognizable buildings in his work, Hopper stated: 'I think
a lot
about the interiors of big cities. I probably try to represent
something
universally valid' (as quoted in Gerald Matt,Western Motel: Ed ward Hopper and Contemporary Art,
Nuremberg, Germany,
2008, p. 7). While a universal representation of a city at
twilight, Shakespeare at Dusk is
an
unmistakably specific New York
image.
"In the artist’s record book next to a small sketch of the present
canvas,
Hopper’s wife, Jo, wrote: 'Shakespeare
at
Dusk. Mall, Central Park about 5
P.M. Nov. [November] dusk with pink glow in sky back of trees.
Foreground grey
pavement, slightly warmed by glow in sky overhead (offstage). 2 statues
on high
pedestals—L. [left] Shakespeare—green; R. [right] Columbus not
distinct. Foreground R. [right]
tall bare tree trunk dark. Foliage across middle green & brownish.
Red lit
electric sign outside park showing thru foliage not well explained. Big
unlit
sign U.S.
top of building L. [left] back. No other signs on windows lit yet.
Silhouette
of buildings outside park across back grey blue” (Artist's Record Book,
vol.
II, p. 9). Hopper consigned Shakespeare
at Dusk to the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery on November 21,
1935,
shortly after completing the work in his studio. As was typical of his
working
method, he made several detailed pencil sketches on location that later
served
as references for the final oil. The ambiguity of narrative
content in
Hopper's paintings, like Shakespeare
at Dusk, sparks the imagination and provokes an endless
interpretation of meaning. Loath to provide commentary on his own art,
Hopper
did explain: 'There is a certain fear and anxiety, a great visual
interest
in the things that one sees coming into a great city' (as quoted in
David
Anfam, 'Rothko's Hopper: A Strange Wholeness,' ed. Sheena
Wagstaff, Edward Hopper, London, 2004, p. 39).
"The preeminent Hopper scholar Gail Levin comments: 'Hopper’s mature
cityscapes
were generally undisturbed by human presence. There is often an eerie
feeling
born of this desertion, this absence of activity' (Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist, New
York, 1980,
p. 45). When an interviewer commented on the lack of figuration, Hopper
observed, 'It’s probably a reflection of my own, if I may say,
loneliness. I
don’t know. It could be the whole human condition' (as quoted in Gail
Levin, Edward Hopper, New York, 1984, p. 69).
"The present work is singular in Hopper’s oeuvre in its
direct reference to a literary figure
that had a significant influence on the artist’s career. While most of
his
paintings contain elements of poetic inspiration, few are as forthright
as Shakespeare at Dusk.
As
Gail Levin suggests, the title of the painting invites a comparison to
the
bard’s oft-quoted description of autumnal twilight:
"That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
(William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73)
"The darker connotations of the last lines may have been particularly
meaningful
to Hopper whose mother had passed away earlier that year on March 20,
1935 at
the age of eighty-one. The loss of his only surviving parent appears to
have
activated Hopper’s own conception of his mortality and his interest in
evening’s waning light, as seen in Shakespeare
at Dusk and House at
Dusk (1935, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond,
Virginia)
of the same year.
"Hopper was a lifelong lover of literature and poetry. As a young
boy, he
discovered English classics and French and Russian translations in his
father’s
library, which he often illustrated with his own drawings and sketches.
This
practice continued into his early career, when he worked rather
begrudgingly as
a commercial illustrator for a variety of periodicals and magazines. In
his
adulthood, he indicated a fondness for Paul Verlaine, Marcel Proust,
Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest
Hemingway,
John Dos Passos, Robert Frost and Henrik Ibsen. It was through study
with Henri
at the New York School of Art that he became intensely interested in
literature
and its relationship to the visual arts. According to his classmate
Rockwell
Kent, Henri’s pupils often talked of literature. They discussed
Verlaine,
Eugene Sue, Charles Baudelaire, and the French Symbolist poets, which
Kent
described as “in keeping with the slightly morbid overtone of Henri’s
influence’” (as quoted in Gail Levin, “Edward Hopper’s Evening,” The
Connoisseur, September 1980, p. 56).
"Stemming from his early interest in literature and Henri’s
philosophical
teachings, Hopper’s paintings surpass an exact transcription of a
physical
location to convey a literary sense of mood and emotion. Most often
these
personal expressions are tied to the artist’s own feelings towards a
specific
time of day, as in Shakespeare
at Dusk.
Writing on Henri’s influence and Hopper’s sensitive evocation of the
evening
hour, Gail Levin states: “Hopper always managed to extract an authentic
sense
of mood. On this subject, Robert Henri offered more specific advice:
‘Low art
is just telling things, as, there is the night. High art gives the
feeling of
night. The latter is nearer reality, although the former is a copy’”
("Edward Hopper's Evening," The Connoisseur,
vol. 205, no. 823, September 1980, p. 56.).
"Hopper’s fascination with the ‘feel of night’ began as early as 1914
with his
most ambitious French composition, Soir
Bleu (1914). He continued the theme on his return to New York
with
his series of nocturnal etchings Night
on the El Train (1918), Night in the Park (1921),
and Night Shadows (1921),
as well as in
later paintings like Night
Windows (1928, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Office at Night (1940, Whitney
Museum of American Art), and Nighthawks.
As in Shakespeare at Dusk,
these works demonstrate Hopper’s attraction to certain qualities of the
evening—mystery, silence, lust, and despair—which can also be detected
in his
favorite poetry. He quoted often from Verlaine’s “La Lune blanche,”
which
recalls the calm of the twilight hour seen in the present work.
"The distinct emphasis on the time of day is apparent in his titles,
which
regularly indicate a general hour. His twilight imagery, such
as Railroad Sunset (1929,
Whitney
Museum of American Art), House
at
Dusk and Cape Cod
Evening (1939, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.),
and
the present work, recalls Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Nightsong,” a poem that
he
described as “an extraordinary visual picture” (as quoted in Gail
Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography,
New York, 1995, updated & expanded 2007, p. 266).
"In this evocative image of Central Park at twilight, Shakespeare at Dusk Hopper
masterfully conveys the sensation of early evening as the vestiges of
sunlight
fade and day cedes to night. He ruminates on the passage of time and
the
unknown associated with the oncoming darkness. While he often
represents
this idea in the form of voids, as in Automat (1927, Des Moines Art
Center, Iowa) and Two Comedians (1966,
Private
collection), his treatment of this theme is more subtle and suggestive
in the
present work. Hopper radically rethought his art following his
1933
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Painted in
1935, Shakespeare at Dusk can
be seen as a metaphor for the new direction of his work, one that would
be less
populated and increasingly existential.
"Hopper’s art, like the poetry and prose that he loved, often suggests
more than
it reveals. 'By refusing to be narrative and aiming instead at
suggestive
symbolic content,' writes Gail Levin, 'Hopper at his best created
paintings
which express the psychological pulse of their time and yet speak for
all time'
('Edward Hopper’s Evening,' The
Connoisseur, September 1980, p. 59). Hopper stated, 'I look
all the time for something that suggests something to me. I think about
it.
Just to paint a representation or a design is not hard, but to express
a
thought in a painting is. Thought is fluid. What you put on canvas is
concrete,
and it tends to direct the thought. The more you put on canvas the more
you
lose control of the thought. I’ve never been able to paint what I set
out to
paint' (as quoted in Gail Levin, Edward
Hopper: As Illustrator, New York, 1979, p. 6). Dusk, with its rapidly
fading
light and evolving hues, manifests this statement."
The lot has an estimate of
$7,000,000 to $10,000,000. It
failed to sell.
See The City Review article on the
Fall 2018 auction of American Art at Christie's New York
See The City Review article
on the Fall 2018 auction of the Barney Ebsworth collection of American
Art at Christie's New York
See The City Review article on the
Fall 2017 American Paintings auction at Christie's New York
See The City Review article on the
Spring 2017 American Paintings auction at Christie's New York
See The City Review article on the
Spring 2017 American Paintings auction at Sotheby's New York
See The City Review article on the
Fall 2016 American Paintings auction at Christie's New York
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Spring 2016 American Paintings auction at Sotheby's New York
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Spring 2016 American Paintings auction at Christie's New York
See The City Review article on the
Fall 2015 American Paintings Auction at Sotheby's New York
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Spring 2015 American Paintings auction at Christie's New York
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Spring 2015 American Paintings auction at Sotheby's New York
See The City Review article on the
Fall 2014 American Paintings auction at Christie's New York
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Fall 2014 American Paintings auction at Sotheby's New York
See The
City Review article on the Spring 2014 American Paintings auction at
Christie's New York
See The City Review
article on the Spring
2014 American Paintings auction at Sotheby's New York
See The City Review article on the
Fall 2013
American Paintings auction at Sotheby's New York
See The City Review article on the
Fall 2013 American Paintings auction at Christie's New York